S.C. Mental Health Director Seeks Hospital Partnerships
Dec. 18--South Carolina's mental health director says he wants to focus on partnerships that will help keep people who should be served by his agency from getting stuck in hospital emergency rooms.
John Magill, who is responsible for overseeing the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, said he hopes a staff-sharing initiative would help mentally ill patients who walk into an emergency room get the psychiatric care they need sooner. Magill said he thinks staff sharing would work at AnMed Health Medical Center.
He said he would like for his agency and AnMed to evenly split the cost of providing staff members inside the hospital who could "bridge the gap" and more efficiently "shepherd the mentally ill" into the care they need.
Mentally ill patients are often stranded in AnMed's emergency room for days as they wait for a bed at Patrick B. Harris Psychiatric Hospital in Anderson. Each time that happens, an emergency-room bed that could be used by up to seven patients in a single day is instead dedicated to just one person.
Magill said his agency is already backing a staff-sharing initiative at Oconee Medical Center in Seneca and at Baptist Easley Hospital.
Magill was interviewed at the Independent Mail office on Tuesday before addressing the Rotary Club of Anderson later in the day.
Michael Cunningham, vice president for advancement at AnMed, said Tuesday that the hospital has not made any decisions about a staff-sharing proposal, but the administration is looking for options that would help mentally ill patients.
"On our end, mental health is not only a hospital concern, but a community concern," Cunningham said. "We see patients have to wait in our emergency department until there is an inpatient mental-health facility that has a bed. That could be one day or five days or multiple days."
"I think the real gap here isn't between the local hospitals and the psychiatric services," Cunningham said. "I think the real gap is the state funding for mental health."
South Carolina's budget for mental-health services was cut by $81 million between 2008 and 2011. A study by the National Alliance on Mental Illness showed that South Carolina was the worst state in the country when it came to funding mental health care. The study showed that by the 2011-12 fiscal year, South Carolina's budget for mental health care was nearly 40 percent smaller than it had been just three years earlier.
Gov. Nikki Haley committed additional money to the state's mental health services in 2012, and Magill said Tuesday that he believes his agency will see an increase in funding in the coming fiscal year.
Harris Hospital, which is licensed for 200 beds, still has to keep some of them closed because there isn't money to pay staff to care for that many patients.
One of the other issues his agency grapples with, Magill said, is providing assistance to mentally ill people who do not need to be in psychiatric hospitals, but who do need "supportive care" to function properly outside a hospital setting.
Magill has asked for an extra $1.5 million in the next budget cycle to go toward residential housing programs that serve and support the mentally ill.
"Certainly, we want to do all we can to help people with supportive housing," he said. "And getting that has an added effect of opening the back door to create more bed space for people who need acute care."
Copyright 2013 - Anderson Independent Mail, S.C.
